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Where does your heart take you?
If this pandemic taught us anything, I hope it was to slow down and be grateful for the lives we have. I will not claim that we all had it easy- I have shed more tears by our “inconveniences” than I’d like to admit. In hindsight, I was able to see how much my family grew together, reprioritized our goals, and hunkered down to be sure we made it out with our health. I know a number of people who lost their lives to Covid-19, which assured I never take the virus lightly. With the newfound appreciation for individual lives, I started remembering those who never lived to see this pandemic and wondered how they would have felt about it. I had a pang of gratitude that they didn’t experience the whole world being turned upside down and viewed a whole new way of grieving them.
In emotion, I create. I have made fused glass hearts before and I honestly despised the process. This time, I was lead to cut equilateral triangles, cut off the edges, and use my saw to cut out the center triangle to finish the form. My grief attached the phrase “cutting pieces of my heart” to this action, and I meditated softly, dedicating a color to each person I missed, giving them my full attention as I cut pieces of my heart for them.
As the hearts started coming out of the kiln- polished, beautifully shaped, and pleasing to hold- I started shifting my grief back into gratitude. I took the thought of “pieces of my heart” and found the positive. What if I took the pieces and instead of cutting them out of my heart, put them together to grow my heart? That inspired my next design idea.
What if, I were to take pieces of grief and gratitude and piece them together like a quilt, then “stitch” the love of my heart to connect them? What if a few of the stitches aren’t perfect, signifying that I will always grieve and miss them, always having space to continue stitches of grief and gratitude?
I hope your 2021 has started out with hope and love. May all of the goals you proclaimed be reached with ease and dedication!
